There’s a scene in Batman Begins, right after when Bruce Wayne gets threatened by a powerful mobster. After ditching his designer coat, he stands in the city’s shipyards and stares off into the distance and the sweeping overture of the movie kicks in, and he’s off. Circling the world and gaining experience through a set of montages.
For some reason the scene holds a power over me. Not because I’m about to start kicking ass in my own Batsuit, but because I have often stood deep in thought, trying to grasp the incomprehensibly large world that lies in my future. Half aware of the tides of adventure about to come my way.
Last night was quite an adventure, and hopefully a bit indicative of perhaps not exactly what, but perhaps similar to what the future holds.
I organized a large group of people to go on a pub crawl through a Buenos Aires neighborhood, practically half of the people on my trip. We started with beer, wine, and pizza in the freezing cold, and then began crawling.
First bar we hit up, the 50 of us traveling absolutely took over the place. The drink special was two for one aka two rum and cokes for one aka two full size glasses aka I might have ordered two rum and cokes aka four rum and cokes.
I looked around and everyone was having an absolute blast. Our college drinking sensibilities meeting foreign drinking ages in our first real night out.
On the way from this bar to the next, I somehow started chatting with a group of people from the suburbs of Buenos Aires. I was able to switch into drunken foreign language skill set (anyone in college language knows what this is) and started having a conversation about the Celtics. Only in Argentina could sport illiterate me sound like a pro, even if that only means repeating Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, Ray Allen and Larry Bird over and over again and repeating opinions about them in Spanish.
Second bar was a cozy hookah bar with a live act performing. Right when we got in, they jumped into a string of Chili Peppers hits, covering them pretty well. However, we definitely through the place over capacity and broke a few fire laws in the progress so I found myself crawling over stumbling college students, drunk on foreign freedom.
The next bar was incredibly trendy and a little bit hazy.
On the way to the final bar, an enormous club, I met up with my Celtics fans again except things were reversed with their rudimentary English celebrating Boca Junior (one of the city’s major soccer teams).
Frankly, I found out last night that I’m simply not a club fan. The place was impressive, goes without saying. It was jampacked wall to wall, yet it was still easy to navigate. The hip hop hits of five years past blasted down at us as people on the dance floor repeated a scene seen in the states at overcrowded frat parties.
Made my way out sometime around 5:30, hailed a cab, and went straight home.
Granted, this experience is almost typical of any study abroad. However, it felt like a real beginning to Porteno (someone from Buenos Aires) life. And of course, now 50 people on my program knew me as the guy who set up the awesome pub crawl night.
However, walking back from class today, I felt a new kind of travel awareness. While searching for a book of Jorge Luis Borges (yes, very tourist of me) at a theater converted into a bookstore, I stumbled upon a copy of the book Harlot’s Ghost in Spanish misplaced in the Borges section.
The book, by Norman Mailer, is a 1300 page tome about the CIA during the Cold War, told through the story of one agent. The man begins his travels and postings right out of college as a young man and finds himself rapidly maturing through his assimilation into daily habits in the countries he works in. A third of the book details his second posting in Montevideo, Uruguay, just across the river from me right now.
Walking down Santa Fe, I felt like the protagonist. Emerging onto the global scene as someone with a little more awareness, someone a little more observant, someone a little more independent.
Granted I’m not down here toppling Communist regimes or sparring with KGB pencil pushers (the book is a realistic look at the bureaucracy and tedium involved in real spying) but I am here on a few missions.
I am finding my long lost relatives. Family of my great grandmother’s sister.
I am going to read the entire cannon of Borges.
I am going to write an incredible research paper that ties together all of the themes that I have been touching on in college.
I am going to become fluent in Spanish.
PS: Argentinean Thief Ingenuity Update
Supposebly several Argentinians sat in on one of my lectures today and through a mix of acting, diversion, and improve, stole the program director’s project from literally behind his back as our session emptied out. Now the directors now buffoon, we’re all convinced he’s the Argentinean Sean Connery, mostly due to his stylish way of dressing, overall demeanor, and resemblance to Sean Connery.
All this means that I am going to be even more cautious. And don’t worry mom, the pub crawl was highly chaperoned and I was surrounded by people from the trip. And I stopped when I reached my limit.
No comments:
Post a Comment